More than a hundred young revolutionaries attended the ninth annual Marxist Autumn School in Switzerland, organized by Der Funke/L’étincelle, the Swiss section of the International Marxist Tendency. Comrades traveled to Biel from German and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, as well as from Austria.

Brutal police repression failed to stop the Catalan independence referendum faced with the determination of hundreds of thousands to overcome all obstacles to participate. What we saw yesterday in Catalonia was on the one hand the real ugly face of the Spanish regime created during the so-called “Transition” at the end of the Franco regime, and on the other the mass mobilisation and self-organisation of the Catalan people to exercise their right of self-determination.